…was my reaction when I saw an 8-track tape for the first time. It’s so inefficient and outdated! Why would anyone use this?
I also imagine that this will be the reaction of my, now 4 month old son, when he gets older and sees a phone book for the first time.
My wife and I received our beloved phone book in the mail yesterday…and it was trashed in less than 2 minutes. This really got me to thinking…
There are approximately 500 million telephone directories each year in this country (between yellow pages, white pages, grey pages, etc)…the population of the United States is not even estimated to hit 400 million until the year 2042, which means that we print enough phone books for almost every man, woman, and child to own two copies!
Assuming each book was 1.5″ thick (although, I’ve received several that were closer to 3″ thick), they would weigh 2.5lbs each. This brings us to a total of 1.25billion pounds of wasted paper per year.
We’re wasting the paper equivalent of the following:
- 312,500 Ford F-150 Pick-up Trucks (basic model), or
- 358,886 Ford Mustangs (V-8 model…because that is the only real model…), or
- 38,461,538 sets of golf clubs, or
- 78,125,000 bowling balls (16 lb), or
- 2,500,000,000 Big Mac Hamburgers (that is 1 Big Mac for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for 2,283,105 years)
Now, I’ve heard that you can opt-out of receiving a phone book, but, until you change the default, the actions of the majority will remain unchanged.
We do crazy things in the name of conservation and recycling, but sometimes the simplest and most effective victories are right on our doorstep.
They were dropping off the phone books a few weeks ago and I was a few seconds too late to say that I didn’t want one. It was also a hot day and this guy was clearly just the delivery man. The amount of waste mail to me is amazing too. What is scary is that it must be financially viable otherwise you’d think they wouldn’t be printing all this stuff.
I wonder sometimes if it is that waste mail is financially viable, or if companies just don’t know of any other good ways to draw in customers. It seems like a lot of companies view direct mailers almost as a necessity (it seems that many brick and mortar companies are pretty slow to switch over to the now available digital means of marketing): They don’t know that you could send something much more personal to a larger group of people in a medium that they appreciate more for a lot less money…
I totally agree!! And the new ones have such small print we can’t even read them! I took 5 of them to the recycling bin last Friday . . .